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Thursday, 4 January 2018

The Products of Your Marriage

Hello lovely people, I am so grateful to God
that we made it to another new year. I am using this opportunity to wish you
all a gloriously blessed year in Jesus name.

I want us to start this new year looking at the
products of our marriage, I have often mentioned that what we sow into our
marriages multiples as yields for us. You can’t expect to get the best out of
your marital life if you haven’t given your best into your marriage. If your
marriage isn’t giving you what you want, then check out the value of what you
are investing into it. And not just the value of what you invest, but that you make your investment with the leading of the Holy Spirit being mindful of the fact that
marriage is not a one-size-fits-all institution. What goes for husband A might
not pass well with husband B and what wife A can tolerate and cope with might
be an outright irritation to wife B so in marriage you need to stay on your
lane and focus on God.

But one product of marriage that is of great
significance to you and the society at large is the offspring that your
marriage produces. The children the Lord has blessed you with. Malachi 2:15
tells us that God made the man and his wife one in flesh and spirit because He
was seeking godly offspring from their union. So to say that you owe God the
responsibility of your marriage producing for God the godly offspring that He seeks.

I am not an expert in parental counseling and
I only have teenagers myself and still on the learning curve like a lot of people
that will be reading this, but one thing that I believe to be true both in
Bible days and our present day generation is that your children and how you raise
and train them have great impact on your destinies as parents. We have read of
Prophet Eli in the book of 1 Samuel 1-3 and how his children through lack of
discipline destroyed all that Eli had worked for as a priest before the Lord. And
we also read in 2 Samuel 11-18 of how the small sin of David’s adultery destroyed
the lives of his children. So we see that our actions and inactions as parents
affects the lives of our children in no small measure as their lives affects ours as parents too. And then consider the
fact that the more godly children we produce from our marriage who in turn fill
up the society, the better the society we will have. As parents we have a very
big role to play in the growth and development of our society through the
growth and development of the offspring produced from our individual marriages.

Like I mentioned earlier, I am not vast in
parenting issues as I am just learning myself, but would like for us to learn
together and trust the Holy Spirit to open up the mind of God to us on this issue;
it’s time to take our parenting responsibilities a little more seriously.

Job1:1-5

In
the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and
upright; he feared God and shunned evil. He had seven sons and three daughters
and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of
oxen and five hundred donkeys and had a large number of servants. He was the
greatest among all the people of the East.

His
sons used to take turns holding feasts in their homes, and they would invite
their three sisters to eat and drink with them. When a period of feasting had
run its course, Job would send and have them purified. Early in the morning he
would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, “Perhaps my
children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular
custom.

There are quite a handful of parenting stories
to glean from in the Bible, a lot of them I wrote about in my book “Because the
Lord Seeks Godly Offspring,” but the one that we will learn from in this post, is the
parenting qualities of the man named Job.

The first few verses of the book of Job tells
us so much about who job is, but one important lesson that I am taking away from these few verses and
would also want you to learn from is Job’s qualities as a father. The Bible
tells us that Job was a very rich man, he was so rich in wealth that he was the
greatest man in the East at his time. You will agree with me that with such
wealth also comes affluence and fame. So it will not be wrong to deduce that
Job was rich and famous. Another thing that should be noticed about Job is that
he was a man who feared God and shunned evil and so we can also deduce that Job
took the things of God very seriously. We can conclude that Job was a man who wouldn’t
miss church activities nor neglect the work of God. He must have been deeply involved
in counseling and evangelism if such existed in his time. All these as a result
of his love for God.

But all of these didn’t deter him from raising
godly offspring. All his wealth and fame didn’t prevent him from purifying his
children after every festive period. It didn’t disturb him from sacrificing to
God on behalf of his children per-adventure they sinned against God in
their hearts. It wasn’t just the open sins of his children that bothered Job,
but the hidden sins of the heart of his children were also a concern for him.

We should also note that Job as a godly man
was a lover of God and the things of God; so his pursuit of God and the things
of God did not make him forget his responsibilities as a father. He was not too
busy with church activities that he forgot to purify his children on a regular
basis. He wasn’t too busy with business and work related meetings that he
forgot to sacrifice to God on behalf of his children, and the Bible tells us
that this was Job’s regular custom.

Do we now think it was wrong for God to make a boastful
declaration concerning the life of Job to satan saying there was none like him
on the face of the earth (Job 1:8, Job 2:3). Job was a true righteous man who
didn’t fail God in any area of his life including his responsibilities as a
father.

I want to learn from the life of Job and I
pray that we all learn too, and the lesson therein is that we don’t have any
excuse to fail God in producing for Him the godly offspring that He seeks from
our marriage union. If Job as the greatest man among the men of the East in his
time did not fail God despite his riches and affluence, then we don’t have an
excuse. And if Job the righteous man did not fail God in his responsibilities
as a father despite his pursuits of righteousness and his work for God, then we don’t
have an excuse.

Eli the prophet failed God as a father and God
did not spare him because he was a priest, so your pursuit of righteousness is
not good enough a reason not to raise your children in the way of the Lord. As
a parent I agree it’s tough combining all roles but with God’s help we are not
designed to fail.

I pray you have been blessed by this piece,
and I pray the Lord will help us dig a bit deeper on parenting as a product of our
marriages and I pray the Holy Spirit will lead us in Jesus name. Remain blessed
in Jesus name.